Internet Marketing Ideas by Steve Weber   Reply to Me On Twitter: Click Here

Everyone who uses Google AdWords has had this happen to them:

Your start a campaign and all is fine for a few days. Then, out of nowhere, Google disables one of your keywords which you had been paying .25 per click for. Now, Google is demanding $5.00 or MORE to get the keyword reactivated!

Here are some things that Google is using to determine which keywords aren’t worthy. Remember, Google is all about providing a quality experience for their customers; their customers are the people who do the searches.

The decision to deactivate a keyword is based partly on the following list.

Compared to the other advertisers using that SAME keyword:

How long do visitors stay on the site the ad leads to? The longer they stay, the more Google thinks the site is good for the keyword.

How much relevant content is on the site? How well does the content match the keyword?

How well does the ad match the keyword AND the content of the site?

Remember, your ad is being compared in these ways with the other advertisers using the SAME keyword.

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You might have heard the news; about half of our state (Oklahoma) has no power after a huge ice storm struck. We are lucky so far and still have power (But have our generator on standby!).

I woke up this morning to see a solid sheet of ice over everything. Besides thinking how beautiful it looked, I was reminded how thankful I was that I learned SEO several years ago. Honestly, and I have said it before, it was SEO that propelled our Internet marketing businesses to the point of allowing us to quit our jobs and work from home. Without the free traffic SEO provided I don’t see any possibility we could be where we are today.

It’s going to be another icy night. I’m sure glad we don’t have to worry about fighting the roads in the morning driving to work!

My tip of the day: Learn SEO!

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Writing plenty of content for your site, your blog, and article directories is great for SEO! However, you can’t take shortcuts by using the same content for each! Duplicate content is an area to avoid if your objective is to have your sites and articles rank highly in the search engines.

Many people have misconceptions about duplicate content. Let’s say I start a new blog and write some great posts for it. After writing each post I also submit each post as an article to an article directory. Is this a good idea?

Nope…Here’s why:

What if the article directory page your article is on gets indexed by Google before your blog’s post does? It could happen this way if the article directory is well respected by Google and crawled often. If Google sees the content on the article directory first, it will probably consider your blog post as duplicate content.

What are the consequences of having one of your pages flagged by Google for duplicate content? Many people think this will lead to being banned. Google won’t ban your page or your site with duplicate content. However, it will penalize the page. This penalty is not site wide, but the penalized page does the rest of your site no good at all. A penalized page is usually still in the index; it is simply bumped way down on the list…WAY down.

Take the time to write original content for everything you post online!

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Sometimes I can’t believe the bone-head mistakes I make. My wife can, but I still have a hard time swallowing them. About 2 months ago my conversion income for  FireFox referrals in AdSense went to zero everyday…even though I always showed conversions every day. The amount earned was always zero. I had been making about 4 to 12 dollars each day from that one site promoting FireForx…not a lot, but it does ad up.

When it stayed at zero, I wrote Google. They wrote back and said they would send it to an engineer to look at. Three more weeks and still nothing. I wrote again. This time they said there was a “known issue” with it and they were working on it. OK, at least they acknowledged the problem I was having; maybe they would credit me back all the conversions I had missed in the past month. Three more weeks and still nothing, so I wrote again.

This time I must have reached someone a little sharper. They pointed out I did not have that site in my list of allowed sites! OH MY GOSH! I had just added to my allowed sites when the payments stopped. I forgot to add that site!!

I added it yesterday and looked this morning; I made 9 bucks from it yesterday. All the past months are gone though and can’t be credited back. I probably just gave Google an extra four or five hundred dollars.

This is what happens when you have 15 or 37 things going at once.  Slow down and pay more attention to the details!

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Your number one concern with a new website is to get traffic to it.  Many beginning marketers skip a very important step at this point. They don’t take the time to properly track and study the traffic coming to the new site.

Even if your site is only getting 10 page views per day, it is important to know everything you can about those visitors. Where did they come from…the U.S. or ???. How did they find your site? What keywords did they use? How long did they stay on your site? What page were they on when they decided to leave? What browser did they use? What was their connection speed?…and the list goes on.

It is vital you track and study these visitors!  Good analytics will provide you with ideas on how to improve what you are doing right and how to spot problems in your current marketing. Many hosts offer analytics with their hosting packages. Some of these may be fine. However, I encourage you to give Google Analytics a try. It is free and extremely easy to setup. Sign up for a free account and you’ll get a few lines of code to paste on your site’s pages.

One more thing, Google Analytics offers “goal” setting tools.  They allow you to track conversion rates for purchases or leads. I use this to track my page views of a given page and how many leads that page generates. …pretty cool stuff!

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